Poet, critic, translator, and former MacArthur fellow, Susan Stewart is the author of six collections of poetry, including The Forest, which received the Literary Award of the Philadelphia Atheneum, Columbarium, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, most recently, Red Rover. As dedicated to the senses as they are to the mind, Susan Stewart’s fiercely ambitious poems never for a minute forget to make music. As Allen Grossman writes, Stewart “has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness, by the light of which it is possible to see the structure of the human world with a new clarity and an unforeseen precision, possible only in her presence and by means of her art.”

Of Columbarium, Edward Hirsch wrote in The Washington Post, ”Each of the poems takes a radcially different form, and no two are alike. It’s as if the endless mutability and metamorphic power of nature find an echo in a series of malleable poetic forms.” Dan Chiasson reviewed the book in Poetry, praising the poems for being “gorgeous in themselves, but more gorgeous for the philosophical heft of the fabric they are embroidered on.”

Stewart recently translated Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini and her books of criticism include The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which received both the 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the 2004 Truman Capote Award in Literary Criticism.

Additional honors include a Lila Wallace Individual Writer's Award, two grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pew Fellowship for the Arts, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. Stewart is currently Professor of English at Princeton University where she teaches the history of poetry and aesthetics. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2005.